Orjonikidze had returned to Moscow for Revolution Day, but on November 9 he would suffer a heart attack and lose consciousness for a time. Stalin responded by intensifying the pressure, driving a public trial of “Trotskyite” saboteurs for a mine explosion in Siberia, which would be afforded expansive press coverage and directly contravene Orjonikidze’s stance on the causes behind industrial mishaps. Treason was made to appear ubiquitous. On November 5, Malenkov had reported to Stalin that 62 former “Trotskyites” had been found to be working in the central army apparatus and military academies. Ten days later, Gamarnik, head of the army’s political administration, and deputy defense commissar, received a list of 92 “Trotskyites” in the Red Army. Altogether, 212 “Trotskyites” were arrested in the military between August and December 1936, but that included just 32 officers, very few of whom were ranked as a major or higher. Despite party pressure and the flow of denunciations, the command staff, concerned with destabilization, exhibited caution.233
NO PASARÁN!
Molotov and other speakers on Revolution Day had blustered about standing up to bullies and how, when confronted, the fascists would desist from further expansionism. But Hitler, after having decided, on emotional grounds, to assist Franco, had quickly imposed limits on his own. He had supplied some 100 planes (fighters, bombers) and nearly 6,500 well-equipped military personnel, the so-called Condor Legion, but he refused the massive troop commitments that Mussolini had made, instead allowing the Nazi intervention to become utterly subordinated to the German war economy. Germany found a place to sell its products and, thanks to monopoly positions with the putschists, obtained desperately needed raw materials and goods (iron ore, pyrites, copper, wolfram, foodstuffs) without having to sacrifice dwindling foreign exchange.234
On November 8, 1936, Franco’s troops began their assault on Madrid from the south. He had put off the offensive, while working to make himself caudillo, a kind of Spanish equivalent of Führer or duce. The delay had allowed the Soviet military adviser Gorev to organize defenses. That day, the first troops of the International Brigades arrived in Madrid. But German and Italian planes had been bombing Spain for a hundred days and, with the Madrid front close to breaking, the Republic government had hastily fled for safety to Valencia. The capital, however, was to be defended. Banners were hung: NO PASARÁN (“They shall not pass”), a Spanish translation of the French slogan of Pétain at Verdun in 1916. Mola’s army, meanwhile, had begun to converge on Madrid from the northwest. Back in October 1936, when asked on the radio which of his four columns would take the capital, he had replied, “The fifth column.” Mola meant that sympathizers to the Nationalists would subvert the Republic from within.235
Fear of such subversion had occurred naturally to Soviet personnel.236 Koltsov had recorded in his diary (November 4–6, 1936) worries about “8,000 fascists who are locked up in several prisons around Madrid,” although the Spanish Republic’s interior minister seemed unconcerned and evacuated himself.237 The logistics of evacuating several thousand prisoners were daunting. Inmates were tied together without their possessions and loaded onto transport—but then, down the road, forced off the buses, verbally abused, and executed by squads of Communists, anarchists, and regular-army men; villagers were press-ganged to dig mass-grave ditches. The executions, in fits and starts over several weeks, killed more than 2,000 prisoners from Madrid jails, without trial, in the worst of the many massacres in the Republic’s zone perpetrated by leading Spanish Communists and their Soviet advisers, Gorev, Orlov, and Koltsov.238 How many of these prisoners were Nationalist sympathizers prepared to take up arms if somehow given them will never be known. In the event, no fifth column materialized, but Mola’s attempted witticism became immortal.239
Madrid came under withering assault for ten days as shrapnel and incendiary shells exploded in its plazas. But Soviet planes had broken the Nationalists’ monopoly of the skies: there was no more bombing of Madrid from low altitude with impunity.240 The Italian Fiat CR-32 and the German Heinkel He-51 proved no match for the more maneuverable I-15 and I-16, while the Soviet SB bomber outperformed the famed Junkers Ju 52. Soviet pilots demonstrated stamina and courage (while gaining invaluable experience: they had had little flight time in training back home). No less crucially, Soviet-led mechanized units, using the T-26, rendered any attempted advance by the Nationalists costly. Soviet tank men would suffer high casualties in Spain: thirty-four killed and nineteen missing in action, casualties of one in seven.241 On November 18, Germany and Italy formally recognized Franco’s Nationalist government, but five days later Franco called off his direct assault on Madrid.242 Morale shifted. “We are finished,” a Nationalist officer told a German military observer. “We cannot stand at any point if the Reds are capable of undertaking counterattacks.”243 In fact, the Republic’s side was too depleted to mount what might have been the decisive counteroffensive.
However much he was motivated by his Trotsky fixation, the high-quality Soviet hardware Stalin sold to Spain showed a desire to strut his stuff.244 In preventing Franco’s seizure of Madrid, the Red Army had indeed demonstrated its mettle for all the world’s skeptics. The French took notice of Soviet aircraft performance in Madrid’s defense; the British, of the overall Soviet effort. “The Soviet government has saved the government in Madrid which everyone expected to collapse,” concluded the undersecretary of state at the foreign office. “The Soviet intervention has indeed completely changed the situation.”245 The Soviet mood was ebullient. “And today,” crowed Koltsov on November 25, 1936, “Franco did not enter the capital.”
SOCIALIST “DEMOCRACY”
That same day, an Eighth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets, attended by 2,016 voting delegates (409 female), opened in the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. Stalin’s lengthy oration—broadcast live on Soviet radio for the first time, revealing his soft Georgian accent to millions—concerned a draft text of a new constitution, motivated, he argued, by changes in social structure.246 He had started thinking about a new constitution no later than summer 1934. (On holiday then, he had requested a copy of the current 1924 constitution.)247 He had had a commission approved, which he chaired and which studied foreign constitutions.248 “Behind the Kremlin walls, work is going on to replace the Soviet constitution with a new one, which, according to the declarations of Stalin, Molotov, and others, will be the ‘most democratic in the world,’” Trotsky had written in May 1936, adding that “no one is acquainted with the draft of the constitution as yet.”249 But in June 1936, Stalin had had the draft published for months of public commentary. Soviet propaganda delivered saturation coverage, and claimed that by fall 1936 half a million meetings had been held, encompassing 51 million people.
The new constitution ended legal discrimination against “former people” (kulaks, priests), to considerable complaint from the party rank and file.250 It altered the electoral system for soviets from indirect to direct, from restricted to universal suffrage (returning the vote to former kulaks), and from open to secret balloting.251 Most remarkable, it enumerated a plethora of individual and social rights (pensions, free medical care, education).252 The Menshevik émigré press acknowledged that the terroristic Communist dictatorship was not going to self-liquidate, but nonetheless speculated that the constitution might unleash new political forces.253